Google's Antigravity update silently replaces IDE with a chatbot

A Google AI Ultra subscriber describes waking up to find their Antigravity IDE replaced by a Codex-style conversational prompt box after a background update pushed at I/O 2026. The update aggressively rewrites application paths so that even the separately hosted legacy installer (quietly tucked at the bottom of the download page) launches the new 2.0 chatbot interface instead of the IDE. Reinstalling does nothing; the only fix, confirmed by other users on the Antigravity subreddit, is to fully purge every 2.0 binary before reinstalling the standalone IDE.

Even after recovering the interface, the forced migration wipes chat history and settings, dumping the previous profile into an antigravity-backup folder of uncertain contents. The author argues this breaks the plan-review-implement workflow they rely on for production work, where predictable output matters more than agentic demos.

The broader complaint is about trust: background updates are for patches, not for swapping out an entire product. Shipping a different application under the same name and hijacking launch paths turns a routine update into a forced product migration, and leaves users hunting for ways to disable auto-updates on tooling they depend on daily.